A shortage of workers with practical technical skills makes it harder for some Ghanaian businesses to maintain equipment, avoid production delays and improve efficiency, as more young people enter the job market.
Skills for Progress Africa (SFPA) is seeking to address the gap with a fellowship programme that will give young technical professionals more practical exposure before they enter full-time employment.
The programme has started with 10 Fellows and is expected to grow to 10,000 over time.
For businesses such as factories, engineering companies and construction firms, having technicians who can identify faults, operate equipment and fix problems can help reduce downtime and keep production running.
Executive Director of SFPA, Kwame Nyatuame, said the fellowship was created to close the gap between what young people learn in technical institutions and what employers expect from them.
“Education without experience is incomplete, and talent without opportunity is a tragedy,” he said.
The programme was launched in Accra under the theme, “Building the Workforce That Will Build Africa,” with industry leaders, TVET practitioners, policymakers and development-sector representatives discussing the skills needed to support Ghana’s industrial growth.
From the classroom to the workplace
Managing Director of ELAF Industrial Automation Limited, Solomon Bekoe, said Ghana needed to do more to connect technical education with employment.
He said enrolment in pre-tertiary TVET programmes had increased by almost 130 per cent over seven years, while youth unemployment among people aged 15 to 24 in Greater Accra reached 49.3 per cent in the third quarter of 2025.
“We don’t have an unemployment problem. We have a connection problem,” Mr Bekoe said.
He said the problem affected both employers and graduates. A company loses time and money when it cannot find someone with the skills to diagnose and fix a technical fault, while a graduate without practical experience may struggle to find work.
ELAF, the fellowship’s founding technical partner, will provide the Fellows with training in industrial automation, combining digital learning, simulation and practical work through the Festo LX platform.
Mr Bekoe urged companies that take on Fellows to give them real work to do and allow them to solve actual problems instead of simply observing workers.
Skills and productivity
Managing Director of Niche Cocoa, Lloyd Ashley, said young technical workers also needed to understand how their work affected business performance.
He urged the Fellows to look for ways to reduce downtime, simplify processes and use data and automation to improve efficiency.
He also said companies needed to build workplaces where workers could report problems, ask questions and share knowledge with less experienced colleagues.
Growing the programme
SFPA plans to use the first 10 Fellows to test and improve the programme before expanding it to 100, then 1,000 and eventually 10,000 participants.
The fellowship combines technical training with workplace experience, mentorship and professional development.
The organisers say the aim is to give young people a clearer path from TVET education into employment while helping businesses find workers who can contribute to production from an early stage.
If the programme can successfully connect training with jobs and measurable improvements in workplace productivity, it could provide one way of addressing two of Ghana’s pressing economic challenges: youth unemployment and the shortage of practical skills needed by industry.
